Movies, oh boy

At the suggestion of a friend, I went to see the movie Winter's Bone, an independent film showing at a nearby mall. Over lunch, my friend's comment had been, "It was hard to watch, but it reminded me of your book."
--A certainly, then, that I must see it.
And so I did.
Wow.
Do not go, do not rent it, unless you are ready for a simple plot set in the deep woods of the Missouri-Arkansas line, a story peopled with characters so real they hurt. In the dark of the theater, I lifted a finger and pointed and said out loud, "I know her. And her. And I've seen him."
Sure wish I'd been the writer for that film.
Last night I finished reading The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. I stayed with it to the end, and it was only in the end that we saw that same true poverty and fabulous folks -- it was as if the movie and the end of Joshilyn Jackson's book had merged.
So, poverty, I think, may be the literary byword.
We've talked only about how these last years' economy has affected jobs and salaries and lay-offs and down-sizing.
Poor us.
And I mean that. But we've missed a lot. Back in the woods, in the hills, on the roads whose signs have been gone so long, nobody knows what they're called anymore, up popped the meth labs and home was the single-wide. Family clinging to family in need and secrets, for defense and protection, in a way most of us will never know.
Poor us.
They're surely the folks who live in my head, the ones I want to write about.